Many dissents and powerful ones. That is what we are inevitably going to see at the end of the Supreme Court term as the justices tend to have strong views when dealing with such hot-button issues as those on the Court’s plate. We have many examples of this from the past. One is Rucho v….
Category: 2021 Term
Martinez-Ramirez and the Direction of 6th Amendment Rights
Most of the Supreme Court discussion today is focused on the Shinn v. Martinez-Ramirez case which narrowed the room for criminal defendants to plead ineffective assistance of counsel under the 6th Amendment. It did so by holding that when an attorney at a post-conviction hearing does not raise a claim of ineffective counsel at trial,…
Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson Text Stats
The first abortion-related decision of the 2021 Supreme Court term, Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, examined the following issue: The State of Texas adopted a law banning abortions at approximately six weeks of pregnancy, in clear violation of this Court’s precedents holding that a State cannot prohibit abortion at a point before viability. To try…
April Week 1 in Review
Here are the mini-analyses I ran this week: Text Analysis of Thompson v. Clark (20-659) Below is an analysis from Thompson v. Clark (20-659) which was released this week. It was a 6-3 decision. First, here is a wordcloud (a visualization of the most dominant words used) of the majority opinion authored by Justice Kavanaugh…
Elites at Cert
The odds are stacked against attorneys seeking to have their cases heard by the Supreme Court. While attorneys working on cases accepted for review have a 50/50 chance of success on the merits, the average likelihood of a cert grant is around 1%. Certain attorneys though have a much higher success rate (also documented in…
SCOTUS Oral Argument Week 1 Quantitative Recap
A week ago, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in five cases. These cases ranged from dealing with land and water disputes to sentence enhancements, from the admission of trial court evidence to state-secret privileges. Lots can be made of the words the justices and attorneys said in oral argument. What is not as obvious…
The Court’s Decision Making Through January 2021
The addition of three justices in four years under President Donald Trump along with a year of Covid-19 has slowed the Supreme Court’s business. So far this term, we can note that the Court is in the midst of a downturn in terms of the number of opinions it decides by the end of January…
Empirical SCOTUS 